Everyone is talking about the "cloud", but one company, Berg, is trying to put a happy face to the amorphous concept with the announcement of a technological throwback: a printer. The Little Printer is a wireless connected printing device designed to work less like a sheet-by-sheet household printer and more like a miniature printing press of Tweet-proportions, delivering bite-size daily subscriptions to content you want to receive from the cloud. News, puzzles, messages from friends, a word of the day, horoscopes, the weather report...all configured from your smartphone.

In your front room, Little Printer wirelessly connects (with no configuration) to a small box that plugs into your broadband router. It's this same box that will enable our other planned products in the BERG Cloud family. There's no PC required, your phone is your remote control. We think of BERG Cloud as the nervous system for connected products. It's built to run at scale, and could as easily operate the Web-enabled signage of a city block, as the playful home electronics of the future. Not to mention the smart product prototypes that we work with our clients on, in the other side of our design studio.

Right now, Berg and their BERG Cloud partners are Arup, foursquare, Google, the Guardian, and Nike, with pre-order email notification signup open for the planned 2012 launch of The Little Printer.